The Steam page for Bethesda's upcoming time-bending FPS Deathloop emerged today, and eagle-eyed fans have noticed a detail about the shooter that could potentially be a deal-breaker for some players. Arkane Lyon and Bethesda will be including the infamous Denuvo DRM on the game's Steam release, potentially opening up users to performance issues and unwanted processes, should they choose to install Deathloop.
It isn't a good look for Bethesda, which just this year included Denuvo in Doom Eternal's Steam release only to drop it a week later. Fans and developers alike have reported that the software, which is intended to prevent illegal copying and cheating, has been responsible for affecting gameplay in titles like Tekken 7 and Resident Evil 3, or worse, causing PC storage to degrade from excessive reading and writing to players' SSDs.
In addition to causing problems for legitimate users, Denuvo hasn't always been capable of doing the very thing it was designed for: preventing users from tampering with games. Players were easily able to circumvent Doom Eternal's version of the software when Bethesda included a version of the game's executable without the DRM in the game files on its own launcher, and the same thing happened with Rage 2 in 2019.
Some PC gaming fans interested in games like Star Wars Squadrons, Resident Evil 3, and now Deathloop have allegedly sometimes turned to buying the games and then pirating them just to be able to play without dealing with complications from anti-copying software, or end up skipping titles entirely because of it. Denuvo has stuck around for the past few years because of its difficulty to crack, but that effectiveness has come at the cost of player trust and goodwill.
Only time will tell if Bethesda chooses to stick with the controversial software for its shooter, which has otherwise been received pretty well in the run-up to its release. A delay over the summer moved Deathloop's release date out of 2020 and into May, but it seems like the shooter's surreal atmosphere and Dishonored-like gameplay will make the wait a worthwhile one.
Meanwhile, on consoles, Deathloop is set to be a timed console exclusive for the PlayStation 5, along with fellow Bethesda game Ghostwire: Tokyo. The two titles will keep the existing deal between the publisher and Sony, even as Bethesda itself becomes a division of Xbox Game Studios under Microsoft. It's unclear whether its future titles will be limited to the Xbox Series X and S, but fans should stay prepared for that possibility as the new generation gets rolling.
Deathloop releases on May 21, 2021 for PC and the PlayStation 5.